Real World Toronto: When Comedians Stop Being Funny and Start Getting Real

As sure as Goldman Sachs turns a profit and Don Draper cracks the scotch before one in the afternoon, a comedian who has climbed the Olympian heights of hilarity will one day decide he wants more. After an A-list Funny Man (or Woman) has gained the ultimate validation of a box-office blockbuster, and realizes that all he needs do to make you laugh is speak from his butt, he’ll often turn to the more subtle craft of making you cry.The truth is, comedians are actors too (often highly trained and multi-skilled ones at that). Still, for every Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, there’s a Billy Crystal in Mr. Saturday Night. At the Toronto International Film Festival, we talked to the directors of two small indie dramas anchored by A-list Funny Men—Will Ferrell in Everything Must Goand Zach Galifianakis inIt’s Kind of a Funny Story—to find out what happens when comics stop being funny, and starting getting real.

Over espressos at the Four Seasons, Everything Must Go director Dan Rush described his first encounter with Ferrell: “I had these questions for Will, and my first question was [going to be] ‘Do you see this as a drama with comedic moments, or a comedy with dramatic moments?’ He asked that same question.” That’s when Rush breathed a sigh of relief.Rush was no wide-eyed newbie, having directed many well-regarded commercials over the years. Still, he was taking on an artistically ambitious task for his first feature, an adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story, and casting Ron Burgundy in the lead role was audacious, to say the least. For those who slept through high school English, Raymond Carver’s terse, minimalist prose and tales of quiet desperation can be called many things—poetic, heartbreaking, genius—but over the top is not one of them. “I was really fortunate that we had the same instincts on a lot of stuff,” he says.Rush learned to trust Ferrell not to chase the easy laugh and found that, like many comedians, he was willing to go to some particularly dark places: in one scene, Ferrell emotionally crushes the gentle, doe-eyed, and quite pregnant Rebecca Hall while in the midst of a bitter alcoholic depression. (Sound familiar, Carver fanatics?) The same deadpan earnestness that powered his infamous Dubya impression is wielded here like a knife of liquored-up despair. Maybe only a beloved funny man can get away with behavior that would otherwise make a character unlikeable. And Rush didn’t forego taking advantage of Ferrell’s prodigious comedic gifts: he let the actor run free when it came to improving—“I wasn’t super precious about the things that I’d written.” And when a new joke occurred to him, he vetted it with Ferrell for funniness, which was a nice perk: “I can run this joke past the funniest dude in the world.” In the end, Rush even felt liberated from the pressure to crack jokes. When you’re working with the funniest dude in the world, he said, “you’ll never be as funny as that person, no matter what you do.”

Indie-film darlings and married directing duo Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden found themselves in a similar situation while working on their latest film, It’s Kind of a Funny Story. They’d earned street cred with the quietly powerful dramas Sugar and Half-Nelson (the latter nabbed Ryan Gosling an Oscar nomination), but their latest is something different: a touching tale of a depressed teen in a psychiatric ward that plays like a mash-up of Almost Famous and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Galifianakis was a surprising choice to play the boy’s unlikely mentor, a fellow patient named Bobby.“We looked at The Hangover and thought, well, that’s great, it’s a funny movie, but we didn’t necessarily see Bobby in Zach,” according to Ryan Fleck. Still, at their producer Kevin Misher's suggestion, Fleck and Bodensat down with Galifianakis and were more than pleasantly surprised.“He was such a warm charming dude whose smile lit up the room, through that beard, We were like, ‘Man, that’s something we hadn’t really seen him do before on camera.’If he can take more elements of himself, the charming guy we met, and then combine them with the rough-around-the-edges dark character we’ve seen in his other roles, then this could be something really special.”

And that’s exactly what they got: Galifianakis is as zany as ever, but with a new pathos, vulnerability, and sweetness that calls to mind Harpo Marx in a moment of quiet retreat.Did the directors use some special trick to get this performance out of him? “I don’t think so,” says Fleck. “He wasn’t trying to be silly during the dramatic scenes. He knew what each scene was and what it required, and we just urged him to bring as much of his real personality into the role as he could.”Well then did Boden pull a fast one in the editing room? “I think that as an editor, I’m always looking for little quiet, silent moments, silent expressions that people have.I don’t think it’s different for Zach than anybody else.”At last, sensing our despair at learning the ultimate secret to turning a funny man sad, she mercifully elaborated: “I really love finding those quiet reactions or moments when an actor disengages from the dialogue for a second and goes inward, and I thought that was particularly helpful for Bobby because he’s kind of this character who’s pretty extroverted but then he has all this internal conflict&hellip;. You know, Zach gave those kinds of expressions even in the middle of something that might seem like a comedic scene or have a comedic tone.”

It seems the secret to turning a Funny Man sad is all in the casting: like any other film, he just has to be right for the role. For Fleck, it was that first conversation that sealed the deal: “He became a star in The Hangover, so he’s not going to audition for the part. What we’ve got to do when we meet with him is just find out who he is and see if he shows us something, just in the conversation&hellip;. It [was] nice to see he wasn’t, like, the creepy guy who was like fucking with us the whole time.”